


Blowing In The Wind

by cantonforking



Category: X-Men: First Class (2011) - Fandom
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-07-21
Updated: 2011-07-21
Packaged: 2017-10-23 08:01:12
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,000
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/248011
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/cantonforking/pseuds/cantonforking
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Based on a prompt from <a href="http://1stclass-kink.livejournal.com/profile"><img/></a><b><a href="http://1stclass-kink.livejournal.com/">1stclass_kink</a></b>: '<em>Janos' inability to speak is connected to his powers' </em>found <a href="http://xmen-firstkink.livejournal.com/2439.html?thread=1470599#t1470599">here</a>.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Blowing In The Wind

Janos has always been able to hear the wind. It’s been his lullaby, his distraction, his constant companion. Sitting in a world that hates everything different, he listens to the wind whisper in his ear of places far away where he knows one day he will go.

When he is six he tries to talk. His parents have been worried. He’s heard their voices carried on the wind saying words like ‘unnatural’ and ‘wrong’. These are words he already knows, words that have been spoken behind his back so many times before. They mean that people look at him strangely and children his age avoid him. They mean that he’s different. They mean ‘freak’.

But his parents are worried and he doesn’t want them to be. No young boy wants his parents to be worried because of him. So he goes to his mother and tugs on her shirt and says ‘mama’. She screams and jerks away, hands flying up to cover her mouth. Nothing is better, she is still sad.

He follows her when she runs to his father because he wants to know what he is doing wrong, why people look at him like he’s different. They speak quickly to each other, leaning together and whispering. The wind carries their words to Janos.

“He can’t speak.”

“What do you mean?”

“It isn’t English. There aren’t words.”

“What, he can’t speak English?”

“No, it’s like he tries to speak but he just… whistles. I don’t understand. What did we do wrong?”

There’s something strange in her voice, something that reminds Janos of the children in the park who laugh at him. It’s something that he’s felt before. His body seems to realise it before his mind does and tears well up in his eyes. Fear. His mother is afraid and it’s Janos’ fault.

“Hey, son.” His father is kneeling down in front of him, a smile on his face that is plastered over worry. “Can you speak for me?” Janos shakes his head. The last time he spoke he scared his mother and he doesn’t want to do that again. He doesn’t want people to look at him like he’s different, like he doesn’t belong.

“Just say your name for Papa.” But his father is looking at him expectantly, trusting his son to do the right thing. Janos doesn’t want to disappoint his father so he says his name. This time he asks the wind to bring his words back to him, bear the echo back to its owner.

His father’s face crumples and he shies away. A whimper escapes Janos’ mother as she clutches at her husband’s shoulder. They look at him like the children in the park do. Like the adults who hide their words behind their hands. The people who talk about him because they think he cannot hear them.  
As if the wind cannot bring sounds back to him. Janos’ words travel on the back of the wind and whistle past his ear. Then he understands. His words speak like the wind. There are no human sounds in Janos, no English or Spanish or French or Mandarin or any of those other languages that people talk to each other in.

His father turns away, pulling his mother in so she hides her weeping eyes in his shoulder. They are shutting him out, spinning their bodies, spinning their lives away from him. The world is tilting and his father calls him a ‘freak’.

The world is tilting and Janos is falling far away with the wind whistling in his ears.

“Riptide,” Shaw smirks at him. “That’s an interesting name.” Janos knows that this man who shivers with energy is laughing at the miss-matched words that give him his human name. It doesn’t bother him. They’re just words from a language he doesn’t bother with.

Words used to have meaning for him. Words used to hurt him, scar him, burn him, cut him down until he was only what the words made him. It used to be that words could control and define him but he hasn’t listened to human words in a very long time.

“You don’t speak much do you?” Janos turns to the woman in white, the petite lady with the mind of a frost giant. She narrows her eyes and tilts her head slightly. Ice cold fingers stroke his mind and he lets English words float into her grasp.

“He says he cannot speak in a language we will understand.” The fingers start to dig deeper, reaching into his mind. He smiles slightly and thinks in the scream of a hurricane. With a wince she draws the fingers back, hand fluttering up to rest on her temple. “In his mind-” she pauses, eyes squeezing shut for a moment “-it’s like being in a tornado.”

“What do you mean?” His father asks. “What, he can’t speak English?” There is patient condescension in Shaw’s voice.

“It seems his ability prevents him from speaking anything humans speak. Instead he sounds like the wind.” They turn to face him, eyes studying him like spotlights fixed on their target. He waits for the inevitable words of distrust and arrogance, laced with the superior tone of one who believes they know right from wrong.

Shaw smiles. “Welcome brother.” The wind carries to words back to him, repeating them until he knows it wasn’t just an echo of a wishful dream. They whistle happily in his ear, telling him stories of a world of other people, a world of other ‘freaks’. The wind tugs at his hair and slips through the fibres of his clothes. The wind races through his mind, weaves into his thoughts. It tells him that they’re not alone, not anymore.

Janos laughs and it is the sound of the wind skipping along the water, ruffling the waves, spinning pinwheels and tickling the trees. The cold woman raises an eyebrow but Janos sees amusement in her tight lips. Shaw’s eyes gleam and for a moment he smiles.


End file.
